Over the years, coin-operated vending machines have become increasingly popular for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they eliminate any need for human intervention in transacting sales of vended product. As a consequence, product can be sold at desired locations at any time of the day or night, without the assistance of sales personnel. Such machines are, therefore, of considerable convenience to both the purchaser and seller alike.
One popular version of such machines involves the use of parallel rows of horizontal coils disposed inwardly from the front of the machines, the coils being rotatable upon the insertion of a predetermined number of coins. Packages of the product being vended are held between adjacent loops of the coils and transported to a dispensing point as the coils are rotated.
In some types of machines, as in co-pending application, Ser. No. 492,824, the coils are directly connected to manually operated dispensing mechanisms, rather than to electrically driven linkages operated from a control panel. Manual operation is of considerable advantage since component failure within such a machine normally disables only one product-dispensing coil, rather than making the entire machine inoperable.
In addition, such manually driven machines contain far fewer components, and are much easier to repair than their motor-driven, electronically-controlled automatic counterparts. As a consequence of this simplicity, manually operated vending machines are much less expensive to manufacture than those of the automatic type. Because of their significantly lower cost, the manual machines can be located in lower volume sales locations while still providing an attractive return on the investment required for their purchase.
The larger, more expensive machines do, however, provide one very desirable characteristic in that they are capable of providing more sophisticated monitoring of the coins used to operate them. In this regard, the advantage inherent in all coin operated vending machines, i.e., they eliminate any need for human intervention in transacting sales, makes them relatively vulnerable to fraud by trick, or to the use of false tokens since sales personnel are not present to observe the vending transactions.
While the multiple testing of coins tendered to the operating mechanisms of the more elaborate vending machines has heretofore provided them with perhaps their most notable advantage, unfortunately such methods of testing typically require complex electrically operated components, and are thus incompatible with the objective of providing less expensive vending machines. However, the relative vulnerability of the manual machines to fraud has heretofore somewhat reduced their attractiveness to vendors, and it may be assumed that at least to a certain extent this has reduced the sales of such machines.